trying to make decisions found this thing very useful, and we gave away thousands. One company even bought a case of 1000 charts (they paid 93 cents apiece for them) and gave them to all their sales reps at a national sales meeting. Not only were they advertising for us, they were paying for the privilege. Now I was operating on a different set of rules, and I was much more successful. THE SEVEN CARDINAL RULES OF THE 80/20 SALES PRO These are the seven cardinal rules of the 80/20 sales professional: 1. No cold calling. Ever. You should attempt to sell only to warm leads. 2. Before you try to sell anything, you must know how much you’re willing to pay to get a new customer. 3. A prospect who “finds” you first is more likely to buy from you than if you find him. 4. You will dramatically enhance your credibility as a salesperson by authoring, speaking, and publishing quality information. 5. Generate leads with information about solving problems, not information about the product itself. 6. You can attain the best negotiating position with customers only when your marketing generates “deal flow” that exceeds your capacity. 7. The most valuable asset you can own is a wellmaintained customer database, because people who’ve already bought from you are way easier to sell to than strangers. I developed a great rule of thumb. I looked at all my customers and focused on my top 10 customers. The top 10 are the accounts that I’m paying attention to, trying to help them out, and ultimately trying to close business. I decided, I’m going to take all of the magazine editors that
are in my industry, and as a group they will get as much attention as one of my 10 best customers. This meant as a group, they got 3 percent to 5 percent of my time. I took their phone calls and returned their phone calls. I kept up with them and their editorial schedules, just like I kept up with my customers’ buying schedules. Building relationships with the press is not how most salespeople prioritize their time. A short-sighted sales manager or boss will typically pronounce that this is a waste, insisting that it’s a “numbers game,” and you just need to make more calls and drive more miles and see more people. He’ll tell you you’re lazy and trying to dodge doing your job. He’ll be foolish for thinking that, as you’ll see. I made friends with those editors and offered to write them magazine articles. This strategy got over 100 pages of free publicity over a span of 18 months. That publicity cost nothing but time and shoe leather—zero dollars. In less than two years, we were everywhere in our tiny little industry. (Most industries are very small when you get right down to it. Before long, people from coast to coast know your name.) Everyone knew who we were, and even though we only had 15 employees, we were taking on billion-dollar firms. The articles I wrote racked the shotgun, bringing us emails, leads, and phone calls from hot prospects. That ended up being hugely beneficial for me personally, because when I left the company I realized, “Hey, wait a second. I’ve got good relationships with literally 10 different magazine editors in this industry, and the relationship is not with the company I work for, it’s with me!” This had happened almost by accident. The editors didn’t care what I sold, because they knew if they wanted a good article about something, they could come to me and I’d write it. So all I’ve got to do is find companies that want magazine articles written that will put a favorable slant on what they do, and I can sell advertising space. Let’s say a trade magazine ad cost $6,000 a page, which it did. I would say, “I’ll write you a two-page article, and that’s
$12,000 worth of space. But I’ll only charge you $3,000 to write and place the article,” which is exactly how I transitioned from a wage slave to an independent consultant—writing magazine articles. YOU GOTTA GET TRAFFIC The first step to getting anyone to listen to you is getting ears and eyeballs. There’s a huge range of media outlets you can use to get in front of people and/or acquire customers: • Foot traffic and physical space in a retail store • Radio: AM, FM, satellite • Podcasts • TV • Google AdWords • Ads in e-zines • Endorsed email blasts from affiliates • craigslist • Pop-under and popup ads on other sites • Postcard mailings • Direct-mail letters • Facebook ads • Twitter • Linkedln ads • Magalogs-catalogs that look like magazines • Spots in other peoples’ catalogs • FedEx envelopes to highly targeted prospects from carefully selected mailing lists • Banner ads • YouTube videos • Telemarketing • Press releases • Books • eBay • Yahoo! stores • Amazon Kindle books
• Appearance as an “expert” on a talk show • Exhibitions at trade shows • Infomercials • Free white papers • Fliers distributed house to house or business to business • A custom teleseminar for another person’s email list • Guest blogging • Reverse auction sites like Elance.com • Ads in magazines • Pinterest • Remnant space in local newspapers, purchased at deep discount rates • Presentions at seminars • Magazine articles and e-zine articles • Flier inserts in newspapers, magazines, or mailorder shipments (that’s called “insert media”) • “Dimensional Mail”-sending people interesting objects with a letter attached. (One guy I know mailed out a six-foot canoe paddle. Another stuck his note in a pouch stuck to a basketball. Another mailed an iPod Nano with a personally recorded message on the player.) This was because of the relationships I had with these editors. That’s a good publicity strategy for any salesperson who doesn’t mind sitting down and writing. The best part is, through this strategy of generating leads, using publicity and positioning, not making cold calls, and selling to our hot leads, we grew that part of our business from $200,000 in sales to $4 million in four years. We sold the company to a publicly traded firm for $18 million. As a marketer or salesperson, you MUST thoroughly master at least one form of advertising media. Until you do, you will be at the mercy of whatever comes along. You’ll be cold-calling all day, or knocking on doors, or praying for rain, or hoping some guy in the marketing department does his job.
The Yin and Yang of Media and Traffic Expertise The yin: It’s impossible to become proficient in every form of advertising. You need to focus on one to three forms of marketing and advertising, so that you are much more skilled in the use of those media than most people. The yang: If your entire business is dependent upon one source of traffic, one advertising medium, your business is a stool with only one leg. A train wreck waiting to happen. You need to get new customers from a diverse range of sources. This yin and yang IS about balancing of specialty and diversity. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a lousy longterm plan. But spreading yourself too thin is just as bad. Most direct-and online-marketing success stories I’ve seen over the last 10 years have this in common: The entrepreneur became extremely proficient at the use of ONE sales channel and used it to develop a firm foothold in a desperately competitive marketplace. So the first thing you need to do as a marketer is master one of these. Make this your absolute, paramount, number-one priority. Then you can pick up another and start diversifying your business. I have an expanded report in the online supplement at www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplementthat reviews the pros and cons of these various marketing channels . Ultimately, the solution to the specialty/diversity problem is in the “winner take all” phenomenon which I explain in Chapter 10. PARETO SUMMARY ▷ Cold calling is dead. You should talk only to prospects who are genuinely interested in what you have to sell. ▷ Don’t use shoe leather and cold calling to generate leads. Think positioning, not prospecting. ▷ If your company won’t generate sales leads for you,
▷ If your company won’t generate sales leads for you, generate them yourself. Mastering at least one form of advertising media beats cold calling any day. ▷ There are many dozens of sources of advertising, publicity, and traffic. You must master at least one of them.
CHAPTER 5 How to Use the “Invisible Money” Finder at www.8020Curve.com Now that I’ve covered the basics of 80/20 traffic, I’m going to show you how to really put 80/20 to work in a serious way, because so far I’ve only scratched the surface of how you can use it. Then in the chapters after that, I’ll give you more highpower principles and techniques to add to your marketing toolbox. But first, the simplest, most powerful business x-ray tool I’ve ever used: a website that makes 80/20 predictions. Discover the 80/20 Power Curve–www.8020curve.com When I first discovered the power of 80/20, I immediately pictured the Power Curve in my mind. But I hunted everywhere and couldn’t find anything exactly like it, so I decided to create it myself. This tool is a breakthrough that evolved over a long span of time. It’s eerily accurate and applies to literally a million different things. For proof of that, or if you just enjoy numbers, flip to the Appendix and see how accurately this tool models a wide range of things from the sizes of Fortune 500 companies, to donations at a small church, to milk production in Wisconsin. For several years it’s been my secret weapon. I don’t approach a single marketing problem without picturing this tool in my mind. Let’s start using it now. You’ve got 100 people, and you offered them a $50 product. 40 of them bought it. What does that look like? Plug the
numbers into the tool like this: Figure 5-1. Here’s what the resulting Power Curve looks like, in Figure 5-2 on page 33. The shaded area represents the money you’ve collected: 40 people x $50 = $2,000. The part above the shaded area shows you how much more money those people are capable of spending if you have more to offer them. Since those 40 people bought a $50 product (assuming other people saw the offer and didn’t respond), how many would buy a $30 product? The tool tells you. Enter the 30 in this box (shown in Figure 5-3, page 33). Figure 5-2.
Figure 5-3. And here’s the curve, in Figure 5-4. Figure 5-4. The 80/20 Power Curve shows you if 40 people
would spend $50, 72 people would spend $30. How many would buy a $200 product? See Figure 5-5 on page 35. Answer: Eight would spring for a $200 product. This requires that the more expensive product seem proportionally valuable to those people! The customers must feel the $200 product is worth it. They won’t pay $200 for a $1.40 cup of coffee, but they will pay $200 for the espresso machine that went on sale today. So your job as a marketer is to offer them things that they consider to be worth greater amounts of money. If you don’t offer them a super-deluxe experience, they’ll buy one from somebody else. One of your highest aspirations as a marketer should be becoming the alchemist who crafts endlessly irresistible offers, such that people spend a disproportionate amount of money with you. Not only do they buy from you instead of anybody else, they spend far more buying your kind of thing than anyone might have ever expected.
Figure 5-5. The curve also shows you if 40 people spent $50, 8 will spend $200. That’s what Starbucks did to coffee. They weren’t merely better at coffee than the shop down the street—they converted coffee into a luxury item. Suddenly gourmet coffee took off like a rocket. The 80/20 of Sports Fanatics Sports teams harness a very special kind of feedback: sports fanatics’ unscratchable itch. They do this with season tickets, skyboxes, and private clubs. If you want to see the Chicago Bears, you can get into a single game for as little as $19. Season tickets range from $1,000 for mediocre seats to $10,000 for the best seats near the 50-yard line.
But that’s only the start of the luxury options, because season access to skyboxes costs tens of thousands of dollars and up, accommodating a dozen or two dozen people. The most luxurious skyboxes require multiyear commitments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do sports teams get 50 percent of their revenue from 1 percent of customers? They scratch the unscratchable itch. Question: How much will a raving football fanatic, who has money, spend on football? Answer: a virtually unlimited amount. A few will spend a million dollars per year. They’ll spend that money if someone offers them a complete, all-inclusive experience. They can be completely immersed in football, literally and figuratively. They can invite their friends and clients and know that everyone will be treated like foreign dignitaries. Why Do People Spend Insane Amounts of Money? Here’s a little marketing secret for you: Almost everybody has at least one passion, one interest, one obsession where they’ll gleefully spend irrational amounts of money. For some it’s makeup or shoes. For some it’s rock concerts. For some it’s bowling. For some it’s bird watching. For some it’s skiing. Even a very conservative, frugal 56-year-old gentleman, who drives a six-year-old Crown Victoria even though he can afford a top-of-the-line Mercedes. If he really, really loves football, he will buy a skybox. Somehow, he’ll find a way to justify it. The ultimate determiner is the simple fact that he has the money. The Power Curve says that if 50,000 people will spend at least $100 per ticket for a football game, 238 will spend more than $10,000 (see Figure 5-6, page 37). The curve on the right side goes up and up and up. It goes infinitely high and never quite touches the right side. The only limit on 80/20 is that there’s a finite number of people. But if you had an infinite number of people, one of them would spend an infinite amount of money. (Yeah, I know. It’s mind-bending.)
Figure 5-6. If 50,000 people will spend at least $100 per ticket for a football game, 238 will spend more than $10,000. That’s because 80/20 is fractal, which means it’s a repeating pattern where the smallest parts resemble the whole. Consider your lungs. Each one of your lungs is about the size of your hand, but the interior surface area is the size of a football field. That’s because the alveoli, the tiny cavities inside your lungs, are branches within branches within branches. Even though the surface of the lung is two-dimensional, its textured interior surface makes it nearly three-dimensional (2.97 to be exact). That makes the lung itself almost four-dimensional. Lungs are exponentially more effective because of this. Businesses that exploit these laws of nature are, too. This book is about making your 3-D business 4-D. Half the money in the sports industry comes from exploiting this amazing propensity for a tiny percentage of fans to spend
outrageous amounts of money. But to get the full picture, we need to look in the other direction. What about the massive numbers of people who never even come to the game? Using the exact same numbers, ask the tool: How much money will “fan number one million” spend? In other words, if we go way out to the left, to the disinterested people, how much money is available from them? Punch this data into the 80/20 Power Curve as you see here: Figure 5-7. Here’s what it tells you: The one millionth most avid fan spent $7.57, and fan No. 50,000 spent $100. What does that mean? Remember, they didn’t go to the game. But some people spent just as much money not going to the game as the ones who went. Can you spend money on football without going to the game? Absolutely. One of them watched the match at a sports bar. They were influenced by TV commercials. They bought shirts and shoes and hats and team-branded merchandise. They subscribed to pay-per-view. They rented videos of a past Superbowl game. In fact, we can go out one step farther: members 10 million through 1 million. Fan number one million spends $7.57. Fan number ten million spends $1.04. Maybe all he did was watch a few games,
and $1.04 is how much advertising revenue they generated. What about Fan number one at the far opposite extreme? I punch in “members 1 through 1” in “examine members by rank” and it says $1.1 million. So, across 10 million people, the least interested fan spent a buck and the most interested fan spent $1.1 million. The tool says total revenue from all sources = $67,765,010. That’s per game. By the way, the least accurate portion of the Power Curve is the bottom left. I’ve found people at the bottom generally earn less and spend less than the curve predicts. That’s because of “broken feedback loops.” (I explain this further in the Appendix.) The tool assumes that everyone’s at least a little bit interested in football, but some people hate it. Maybe fan number 10 million is worth only 10 cents. Fortunately, the nonfootball fans hardly matter at all, and the raving maniac fans matter a great deal. Remember, at the beginning I assumed: This is a game where at least 50,000 people spent at least $100 per ticket. If this is an above-average game, and other games were less popular, then we would guess that the Chicago Bears’ total revenue is a few hundred million bucks. Is that correct? According to Forbes, the Bears’ total revenue for 2010 was $266 million with gate receipts of $61 million. Yes, those numbers fit pretty nicely with mine. With just one piece of information—the least expensive ticket on a popular game day—the Power Curve gives you a surprisingly accurate estimate of the entire economic picture of a sports team with millions of fans, from 11-year-old kids to billionaires with luxury skyboxes. Why? Because 80/20 isn’t just a business rule of thumb. It’s a law of nature. This only scratches the surface of all the things you can do with this tool. You can put the numbers for almost anything you can measure into the tool, and it will tell you something you didn’t know before. I recommend you check the Appendix to
find out more. A lot of sports are characterized by this kind of hyperresponsive behavior. Golfers are notorious for being maniacs, and I know a lot of marketers who’ve made fortunes selling golf products. Wherever there are rabid, obsessive customers, there’s a great business. But 80/20 doesn’t apply to everything. For example, “number of kids in a family” doesn’t follow the 80/20 rule. That’s because for most people, having one kid doesn’t necessarily make you want to have a second kid even more. By the time most people get to three to four kids, their lives have grown sufficiently complex. Families of eight kids are fairly rare. But it is present in most places. If you have a church of 400 people, 50 percent of the work gets done by 1 percent of the people—probably four paid staff members. Almost all the volunteering gets done by less than 100 people. The least active 300 people in the church do next to nothing, other than maybe showing up on Sunday. If you have 400 people and they’re all actively participating, your attendance ain’t gonna stay at 400 for long! It’s going to grow. This is true in any volunteer organization—church, charity, Meetup group, or parent-teacher association. Have you ever noticed that out of Jesus’ 12 apostles, three were extra-special disciples? Peter, James, and John. The 12 were chosen from a group of 70. 80/20 is everywhere you look, even there. The bad road is wide and the good road is narrow. You cannot change this. All you can do is decide whether you’re going to let it work for you or against you. Even though you can’t change the 80/20 Power Curve, you can raise the excitement level and participation of everyone in your organization. Whether we’re talking about churches, schools, charities, or standards committees, some are hotbeds of activity and others are tombs. Why? Because the speed of the leader determines the speed of the pack. When the leader raises the intensity level, the organization grows. 80/20 is still in force, but you’ve attracted more people and the top performers do more.
80/20 Works the Same Whether You’re Looking at 10 People or a Billion The shape of the 80/20 Power Curve never changes much. Whether we’re looking at the incomes of all seven billion people in the world, or the wages of shoe salesmen in Kuala Lumpur, or the Forbes 400, or the 10 richest people in the world, the Power Curve remains the same. (I’ve included a bonus section on the Power Curve in the Appendix. If you like numbers, make sure you take a look.) This means that your job is to climb the Power Curve from wherever you are right now, moving time and energy from the left to the right. It means that as you move to the right, bigger opportunities will appear in front of you. PARETO SUMMARY ▷ The 80/20 Power Curve is the most important chart in any business. ▷ The Power Curve is true whether you’re looking at 10 people or 10 billion. ▷ You can punch what you know into www.8020curve.com, and it will either report a bunch of other numbers that are true in your business or else will be true once you’ve maximized every opportunity. ▷ Your top job as an 80/20 marketing professional is to move resources from the left to the right.
CHAPTER 6 Simplify Your Life with the Power Triangle There are three steps to selling anything. The first step is getting traffic: You gotta get human bodies, eyes, and ears, to sell to—without raising their defenses, if at all humanly possible. The next step is conversion: You have to convince the person that what you have is going to solve their problem. The final step is economics: You have to give them something that’s valuable and get their money. Traffic, conversion, and economics form a Power Triangle that governs everything that happens in sales and marketing. You should always be suspicious of complicated things. You should be even more suspicious of people who make simple things complicated. The beautiful thing about the Power Triangle is how simple it is. Einstein knew he was onto something big with a simple equation: e = mc2 Even a seventh-grader can deal with that, with a little help from his science teacher. Things that are true and correct tend to have that sort of simplicity. Which brings me to the Power Triangle, a brainchild of my marketing manager, Jack Born. The Power Triangle, in Figure 6-1, always takes you where you need to go, and the 80/20 in the center always focuses you on the points of highest effectiveness. It’s a work of genius.
Figure 6-1. The Power Triangle and 80/20. Warning: Don’t let the simplicity of the triangle deceive you. You can do many things with this tool. (Illustration by Danielle Flanagan.) In order to sell something, you have to get Traffic; then you have to Convert the traffic. Economics means you have to make some money on what you sell. That’s why you’re in business. When you make a profit you can re-invest it in getting more Traffic and Converting the traffic and further improving your Economics. And so it goes, clockwise in a circle. It’s a spiral of never-ending Traffic, Conversion, and Economics. That’s the essence of marketing. It describes every human transaction. You can apply it to romance or volunteering for the Peace Corps or trading favors with your fishing buddies. Figure 6-2. 80/20 is multi-layered: There’s an 80/20 inside each 80/20. (Illustration by Danielle Flanagan.)
The first thing to notice about the Power Triangle is the 80/20 principle sits at the center. It’s there for a good reason. 80/20 is in the center because everything revolves around getting more out for putting less in. And finally, 80/20 is fractal. Inside every top 20 percent is another top 20 percent. Let the Power Triangle Work for You You come to me and say, “I’ve developed this cool new invention, and it’s going to make millions of dollars. How do I sell it?” We’re instantly in Marketing 101. Before we begin some lengthy talk about buying clicks or writing emails or infomercials or any other technique, you need to answer four questions: 1. Who would buy this? (that’s T) 2. What can we say to persuade them to buy? (that’s C) 3. Can you reach them affordably? (that’s E) 4. Can they give you money? (that’s E) The second thing I want you to notice about the Triangle is:
You needed to go counterclockwise to decide how to sell something. Which means the primary skill you must master in marketing is thinking backward. When I was a young-pup marketer writing sales copy, I would remind myself: Perry, you’re not you, you’re them. In your imagination, you’re not sitting at your computer anymore; you’re sitting at theirs. You’re not interested in what you’re interested in; you’re interested in what they’re interested in. I pictured myself physically doing a 180. I do that exercise every time I sell anything. It’s become second nature. To build a sales funnel, you begin with the end in mind, to use Stephen Covey’s famous words. You start from the end, and you work your way to the beginning. Figure 6-3. The Sierpinski Triangle fits an infinite number of triangles into finite space. The Power Triangle is similar.
Figure 6-4. Zoom in, zoom out, the Triangle is the same. Each element always contains all three elements. (Illustration by Danielle Flanagan.)
Then traffic comes into the funnel at the beginning and goes clockwise to the economic end. But since selling starts with traffic, advanced marketers don’t begin with the invention (i.e., the final transaction). We begin by asking ourselves: “What would these people want to buy?” Then we create it or find it. You should also see that there’s a Power Triangle inside each element of the Triangle. It’s true on every scale (demonstrated in Figure 6-4). Zoom in, zoom out, it’s still there. It’s true on the micro level, and it’s true on the macro level. Let’s say that your traffic is Google ads, your conversion is a website sales page, and your economics is that you sell shoes. Inside those Google ads we find another Triangle, as shown in Figure 6-5, page 48. Let’s say your visitors land on a page that offers a white paper in exchange for name, company, snail mail, and email address. There’s a Power Triangle there, too: Figure 6-5. Traffic = People who see the ad; Conversion = Ad copy; Economics = Clicks and cost per click. (Illustration by
Danielle Flanagan.) • Traffic = People who land on your page • Conversion = People who opt in and the reasons they did. They want the cheat sheet or price quote; they want to take the quiz, or they want the free software download. • Economics = What they get in exchange for their email address and the value of that address to you The economic value of an email address is huge. Even with social media, blogs, Twitter, and everything else, email is still the center of the marketing universe. The number-one function of your website is to collect an email address from your visitor before he leaves. And there’s still an 80/20 inside the Google ad: Three to four words in your ad swing most of the response. The most influential element is the offer made in your ad. Your visitor buys a pair of shoes at your retail store. There’s a Power Triangle there, too: • Traffic = People who came into the shoe store • Conversion = Emotional and practical benefits of buying the shoes
• Economics = What they paid for the shoes Figure 6-6. Inside your sales funnel, conversion still involves Traffic, Conversion, and Economics. (Illustration by Danielle Flanagan.) You send an email to your email list. • Traffic = People who get the email • Conversion = Those who do what the email asks of them and the benefits to them, even if it’s not an actual purchase—it could be watching a video • Economics = WHY they respond and the benefit to you Someone clicks on a Google ad (traffic) and lands on your opt-in page (conversion) and gives you their email address (economics). Later you send them an email (traffic), and now they’re on your sales page (conversion) and you’re asking them to buy something (economics). Every move you make comes down to: • Stimulus
• Response • Payoff Great marketers and sales gurus have said Traffic + Conversion = Profits, and it’s true, but it’s incomplete. Economics speaks to the importance of value, and as you consider this, you’ll see it’s really the most important thing of all. Economics drives everything else. This Means • The core essence of marketing is how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer. How well you compete comes down to how much you can afford to pay. That’s economics. • It’s all math and psychology. Much attention is given to psychology, but math is absolutely critical. Good math can save mediocre persuasion, but bad math will sink the best sales pitch every time. During most of my consultations, economics is the first thing I seek to improve. Begin with the end in mind. Make every transaction more valuable. Capitalize on the willingness of the top-shelf customer to spend money. Do upsells and cross-sells and sell ’em something else. Sell results, not procedures. In other words, don’t just sell “pieces parts” and components and items on an a la carte menu. Sell complete packages that simply and elegantly solve the total problem with as little fuss as possible. Create new offerings and new experiences. Invent new products. Imagine what your customers would happily part money for. Get More Traffic and More People to Sell to, NOW Next we apply this—and 80/20—to traffic sources. Most people don’t realize the vast range of options you have when you rent and buy snail mail lists, email lists, and phone lists. There are two kinds of lists:
1. Compiled lists: For example, “All the dental offices in the United States,” or “All the households in zip code 68505,” or “All males between ages 31 and 40 in Cook County, Illinois.” 2. Response lists: For example “Everyone who subscribed to Black Belt magazine in the last 90 days,” or “People who donated over $100 to the Sierra Club in the last two years,” or “People who bought items from the Hammacher Schlemmer gadget catalog.” Compiled lists are things you know about groups of people, generally based on publicly available information. A compiled list is w-a-a-a-y better than just calling names out of a phone book. (I actually did that for a time. It was brutal.) You can easily get a compiled list of “SIC codes,” four-digit numbers that the U.S. government uses to categorize businesses. SIC stands for “Standard Industry Classification.” If you sell any kind of stationery, you could get a list of all companies in SIC code 5943, for stationery stores, and you’re going to have a way easier job. Compiled lists are usually sold. You might pay one cent to a dollar per name for a compiled list, depending on how sophisticated the information is and how many “selects” you buy. Often you can be very selective: “I want vice presidents or production managers, and I want companies with more than $10 million in revenue, who manufacture automotive parts.” Once you buy a compiled list, you can use the data as long as you want to. The problem with a compiled list is, it’s just a list. It’s way better than no list at all, but a lot of names on that list are very low quality because nobody’s racked the shotgun. Response lists are lists where someone has racked the shotgun. The reason someone is on the list is because he has bought something, subscribed to something, donated money, or gone to a trade show. Response lists are much more valuable than compiled lists. And much more expensive. A compiled list—“Everyone who requested a free subscription to Control Engineering trade
magazine in the last year”—adds a couple more layers of 80/20. A response list comes from someone who has already sorted through the world and gotten people to actually raise their hands. That usually means they’ve spent money. Response lists typically cost anywhere from 10 cents to several dollars per name. In the mailing list world, “hotline” names are sold at a premium price. Hotline names are people who bought or subscribed within the last 90 days. That adds an extra 80/20 because if they made that purchase recently it means they’re “in heat” and will probably respond to other, similar offers. Suppose you have a miserable, cold-calling sales job. The fastest way to make your life w-a-a-y easier is to start renting or buying lists so that you are at least eliminating 90 to 99 percent of the time wasters. You’ll discover that when you purchase information like this, you suddenly have a much clearer picture of who you’re talking to and what you need to say to them. It Is to Your Advantage to Pay for Quality! Whether you’re buying web traffic, making cold calls, sending out emails, mailers, or faxes, success starts with your list. If you get a cheap list and then spend all kinds of postage money sending mail to people who will never respond, that’s dumb. Better to spend $2 per name and mail 500 letters to targeted prospects than get a “deal” paying 30 cents per name and mailing 5,000 letters to people who don’t care. If it costs $1 to mail your letter, here’s how the economics work out. Let’s say a response equals a $100 purchase. High-quality list: You mail to 500 people and get 30 to respond. $2 per name list rental + $1 postage x 500 = $1,500 cost. Revenue = $3,000 and you make $1,500 gross profit. Low-quality list: You mail to 5,000 people and get 40 to respond. $0.30 per name list rental + $1 x 5,000 = $6,500 cost. Revenue = $4,000, so you just lost $2,500
before you even covered your product cost. (By the way, I’m making the generous assumption that those same 500 good buyers are mixed in this 5,000-name list. Not always the case. Sometimes a low-quality list is pure junk.) Sales is a disqualification process! The more junk you can eliminate before you spend money and effort, the more effective you are. I’m going to address this in the next chapter. Where to Get Lists The most famous source of mailing lists in the United States is SRDS, the Standard Rate and Data Service, www.SRDS.com. SRDS is an online subscription service. There are thousands of list brokers that you can work through. Other sources you should investigate include Acxiom’s List Direct, www.iblistdirect.com/. I also suggest exploring www.nextmark.com and www.Hoovers.com. I buy lists from Ben Morris at Kristalytics (www.Kristalytics.com/list-brokering) who accesses 150 million household records with over 1,000 data points per record, which are combined from a variety of sources. As soon as you have enough traffic to do an experiment, you need to focus on conversion. That’s next. PARETO SUMMARY ▷ Everything in sales and marketing is summed up in the Power Triangle: traffic, conversion, economics, and 80/20. ▷ Traffic comes first, then conversion, then economics. But great marketers think backwards, which means starting with economics. ▷ There are two sides to economics: the money you get, and the value customers get in exchange for their money.
and the value customers get in exchange for their money. ▷ The simplest, easiest way to get leads is to buy or rent a list. The quality of lists obeys 80/20—most are lousy; a small fraction are great. ▷ The most valuable asset you own is the customer list you build yourself.
CHAPTER 7 80/20 Conversion Now That You’ve Racked the Shotgun, Make ’Em MOVE After four years of working the Vegas strip as a professional gambler, John Paul Mendocha was sitting in a restaurant booth with a couple of his gambling buddies. The other two were having an argument: “Yes, you will.” “No, I won’t.” “Yes, you will.” “No, I won’t.” Out came a Glock. The guy planted the barrel on the other guy’s skull. “Yes, you WILL.” Suddenly John was having another “rack the shotgun” experience. This time, it wasn’t an insight about who to play poker with. It was an insight about what kind of hombres he shouldn’t be hanging with anymore. John said to himself, “Self, if you don’t exit this business real soon, your sad little carcass is gonna wind up in a ditch somewhere.” So literally one day on a Tuesday afternoon, he walked away from the seedy world of gambling forever. He decided to get a real job. John had moved on. Fast-forward a year or two, and John’s working for a hightech company in southern California. John’s experience in all those casinos and dives has taught him a great deal about 80/20, and he understands it far better than his sales managers. His sales manager hands him a stack of leads. “John, I want you to get appointments with all 206 of these people.” John knows that’s ridiculous. John knows that 80 percent of those 206 are a complete waste of energy, and only about 4
percent are strong candidates. He just needs to find a way to find out who’s worth his time. So John devised one. It’s called The Five Power Disqualifiers®.1 John’s 206 leads were his traffic. His next challenge was conversion: What do you say to someone to convince them you can solve their problem? At this point, most books would dive right into persuasion and salesmanship. That would be a mistake. That’s because an 80/20 sales and marketing maven knows, even after you’ve stimulated interest and positioned yourself properly, there’s still another step you need to make before you try to convince anybody of anything. That step is: You must DISQUALIFY people who don’t fit. If they don’t have the money, or your solution doesn’t fit, or if there’s no urgency, then there ain’t going to be no sale. John knew that out of 206 cold to lukewarm sales leads, fewer than 5 percent—probably no more than 10—were actually worth a face-to-face meeting and less than half of those would actually buy. If he called all 206 and asked them the right questions, he could save himself a huge amount of time, then spend the rest of his time delivering exactly what the real customers wanted. The Five Power Disqualifiers® John reduced the sales process to five essential requirements that are always present when a sale is made. I know of no one else who has distilled sales and marketing to such a small number of fundamentals. These go hand in hand with the Power Triangle, because these five things define the who of the traffic that you’re trying to buy. 1. Do they have the money? Some markets consist of
people who have no money. Sometimes the very market itself is defined as a herd of moneyless people. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a buck selling rent-to-own furniture, but know ahead of time it’s going to be tricky to get blood out of them stones. People who do have the money are way easier to sell to! 2. Do they have a bleeding neck? A bleeding neck is a dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved. Right. Now. If you want to make the big bucks, your product has to deal with something that involves one or both of the following: a) Pain and great inconvenience, loss of money, threat of loss, and/or b) some craving for pleasure that borders on the irrational. Big pain, big pleasure. Stuff that hits really close to the jugular or pocketbook. Serious money is always found in those places. If you want the check tomorrow, the problem today needs to be u-r-g-e-n-t. And before you ease the pain, you gotta intensify it. The guy says to you, “It hurts really bad, right here.” You point to his elbow and say “You mean here?” and you smack his elbow with a hammer, hard. He yelps and sees stars for a moment. He nods and takes a big gulp, choking back tears. Yup. Good market for you to go into. What’s the biggest, nastiest problem you’ve ever solved in your life? That’s a real good start, right there. 3. Do they buy into your unique selling proposition? If you’re just going into a market, the question is, what big benefit will they buy into? What kind of deal would they snatch up in a hot second? What benefit do they want that the other guys are not promising? A unique selling proposition (USP) is your unique answer to these questions: • What does your product do that nobody else’s product does? • Why should I buy from you instead of anybody else?
• What guarantee can you make that nobody else can make? Your unique selling proposition is hugely important, and I will focus on it in much more detail in the next chapter. But for now, know that one of your most important jobs as a salesperson or marketer is to not only know the answers to these questions but constantly improve the USP of whatever you sell. 4. Do they have the ability to say YES? I’ve got a friend who lost a big bundle trying to sell a seminar to doctors. They had the money, they bought into his USP, they had a bleeding neck—most doctors were expressing grave dissatisfaction about financial matters that the seminar directly addressed—but it was almost impossible to get a piece of mail into any doctor’s hands. Docs have their staff sort all their mail, and what Helga their assistant thinks is a bleeding-neck issue and what actually makes the doc’s neck bleed? Two different things. Helga the receptionist can say no, but she can’t say yes. This is a huge problem when you’re selling anything. Are you selling to an engineer who’s going to have to get approval from his boss? Are you applying for a job through the human resources department—knowing that HR can only say no and only the VP can say yes? (Hint: Never send resumes to HR. Find out who the hiring manager is, and send it to that person. Preferably in a hand-addressed #10 envelope with a stamp. I’ve included a special report on job hunting for salespeople in the online supplement, www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplement/. ) 5. Does what you sell fit in with their overall plans? If your service requires major brain surgery on the part of the customer, he ain’t gonna take your offer unless brain surgery is literally a lot less painful than the alternative (e.g., dying). Whatever you sell needs to harmonize with natural, existing forces—both on the inside and outside of your prospect’s world.
The most important thing John Paul will tell you about the Five Power Disqualifiers is you want to plow through them as fast as humanly possible. Sales is, first and foremost, a disqualification process, not a “convincing people” process! Step past the sick and the lame early in the game, and deal only with the healthy ones left standing. You will save yourself so much time. The Five Power Disqualifiers are exhibit “A” of 80/20 thinking. In fact, each one typically gets rid of the bottom 80 percent of whomever you’re dealing with. When you’re honest with yourself about all five of these things, you’re automatically dealing with the tippy-top of the pyramid—less than 1 percent. Test Fast. Fail Fast. Move On. Next, Next, Next So John used the Five Power Disqualifiers on his prospects and met only with the ones who passed all five tests. These companies were defense contractors, and he attracted them by explaining that everything his company shipped came with iron-clad guarantees of price, delivery, and performance parameters. Since the level of performance John promised greatly exceeded industry norms, his customers were extremely curious. But his customers had to qualify by reciprocating with equal commitments. Buyers were always intrigued by this, so many times they would meet John on his terms. Instead of driving to their facilities, he developed a different strategy. He would set up camp at a restaurant booth, hand the waitress a $50 bill, and schedule meetings—one engineer or buyer per 90-minute slot—all day. One after another, bam-bambam. So instead of driving all over southern California for eight weeks attempting to meet with 206 reluctant, skeptical prospects, he’d knock out a dozen meetings in a couple of days, seeing only the ones who were hot and ready to go. And that’s how John busted the ceiling on sales quota after sales quota, easily clearing $200,000 per year. Two hundred grand was serious coin in 1985.
Next: Give ’Em Your USP If you’re talking to your prospect on the phone, you need to start with a unique selling proposition that really gets his attention. This is NOT a good opener: “Hi, this is Marty. I’m with Northwestern Mutual, and we’ve got $16.2 billion in assets under management.” Let me share a simple acid test that uses 80/20 to identify good headlines: Imagine you’re writing a classified ad, and you’re going to use your opening statement or headline in the ad copy: I’m with Northwestern Mutual, and we’ve got $16.2 billion in assets under management. Marty, (800) 555-1212. Woo-hoo, isn’t that exciting? I can’t wait to buy some insurance now. Remember that all good sales copy is about your customer, not you. Good copy speaks to the bleeding neck first. Try this: DANGER: If your net worth exceeds even a paltry $350,000, Nancy Pelosi is about to claw $50,000 from your bank account. Transcript from secret congressional committee. Marty (800) 555-1212. Look at how many Power Disqualifiers we managed to use here: Money ($350,000); Bleeding Neck (“Pelosi is about to claw $50,000 from your bank account”); USP (“transcript from secret congressional committee”—nobody else is offering that). We crammed three out of the five into a couple of sentences. A phone script might be, “Hi, this is Marty from Northwestern Mutual. You don’t know me, but I just got my hands on a transcript from one of Nancy Pelosi’s secret congressional committee meetings. If your net worth exceeds even 350K, she’s gonna grab fifty grand fast. I can email this thing to you. Dude, this is really scary.” We’re zeroing in on emotional hot buttons and getting straight to the point. No blathering or corporate MBA-speak. Case Study of a Successful B2B Sales Message
Below is a hunk of copy I’ve used on my website. It’s generated consistent leads every day for years. This is from www.perrymarshall.com/gm. I’ve highlighted the 20 percent that contains the key persuasion elements: “Stop Cold-Calling Business Prospects, Battling Voice Mail—and Make Them Chase You Instead!” Headline starts with their bleeding neck, then offers a benefit statement Dear Sales Professional, After years of dialing for dollars, knocking on doors, and enduring all kinds of rejection and drudgery, I finally made a revolutionary discovery: You can cause the world to beat a path to your door. You can be an invited guest instead of an unwelcome pest. You don’t call them—they call you. The surest way to with a emotionally connect with a customer is to empathize with them, show them that a page of your diary looks an awful lot like their diary. How does this happen? With the power of information and publicity and the science of results-accountable marketing. From Failure to Success... The results were nothing less than astonishing. I multiplied product sales by 2,000 percent, nearly tripled my income, and went from making hundreds of cold calls every month to nearly zero. Most of this page is about pain and suffering, but I’ve deliberately thrown in some pleasure. I helped grow a company from quasi-
I helped grow a company from quasistartup and no name recognition to over 100 pages of press exposure. Four years after I began, that business was acquired by a publicly traded company for 18 million dollars. If you’re making even ONE cold call a day, you’re wasting time and money. And if your company is like 99 percent of all other businesses in America, you are ignoring millions of dollars in untapped sales. A finely tuned marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month in and month out, so your salespeople spend time only with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem. Find their sore spot, and bang it with a hammer. Has your medical doctor ever called you on the phone during dinnertime, asking if you might need help fighting a flu bug? I don’t think so. He doesn’t find you, you find him. And when you do see him, he tells you what medicine you need to take and you take it. If he says you need surgery, you might seek a second opinion, but you’re willing to pay good money for that opinion. And most likely you take the advice, no matter how painful or inconvenient. Do Your Customers Respect You as Much as They Respect Their Doctor? Ouch. More pain.
No? Why not? They don’t know him any better than they know you. You went to school. You have expertise. You know how to solve difficult problems. So what’s the difference? Headlines, italics, highlights and bolds emphasize the most important 20 percent for people who are skimming. This is called “Dual Readership Path.” The difference is positioning. The doctor is perceived to be an expert, so you seek his counsel. The medical industry knows things about marketing and positioning that most people in our industry just don’t know. Most companies just imitate their competitors, and everyone gets dumber every year. I went on a mission to study the most brilliant minds in marketing today, across dozens of industries and professions. The system I’ve developed over the last five years delivers powerful results for corporate salespeople, in a measurable and predictable way. I now produce training tools and consult with a select number of high-tech clients. Your experience as a business owner, marketing manager, or salesperson can radically change for the better in only a few month’s time, simply by learning my system. I invite you to explore my website, and request my FREE Audio Big promise, big benefit Does getting more respect fit into their overall plans? Probably so! CD, Guerrilla Marketing for Hi-Tech Sales People. (All you cover is S&H.) It “Do they have the money?” Charging a few
delivers 12 powerful bullets that bring cold-calling drudgery and advertising waste to an end. Charging a few bucks for shipping and handling eliminated lots of tire-kickers, but interestingly, didn’t eliminate buyers. Just fill out the contact form, and my capable staff will make sure you get it right away. Sincerely, Perry S. Marshall P.S. You’re probably thinking, “OK, so why is this guy giving away an audiobook? Is it any good, or is it just a shameless sales pitch?” There are several reasons why I’m giving this away: 1. There are lots of salespeople, maybe you—who wake up every morning and think “Oh, yuck ... I’ve got to get on the phone today, stay out of voice mail jail, and set up a bunch of appointments .... It’s going to be a real grind.” That’s exactly how it was for me. Oh, to have only had this CD 10 years ago! More bleeding neck. 2. In most companies, there is almost NO relationship between the marketing dollars that go out and the sales dollars
that come in. They spend a pile of money on advertising, and they don’t know what they’re getting for it. Then they start flogging the salespeople on the 26th of every month. This CD will show you how to fix that problem. Let’s hammer on that sore spot some more. More pain. 3. Of course nobody’s going to hire a consultant or invest money in sales tools unless they’re convinced that I really know what I’m talking about. Listen to the CD and decide for yourself. This is no infomercial—it’s solid information that you can use right away. I have a hunch you’ll not only enjoy it but you’ll probably pass it along to three to four other people, as others have done. Fill out this form to request a free copy of Guerrilla Marketing for Hi-Tech Sales People. (You just cover Shipping & Handling.) Every sales message needs a call to action! I promise you’ll never think about sales the same way again! This Guerilla Marketing CD offer is a classic, decade-long lead generation success story. It employs my favorite persuasion formula, Problem—Agitate—Solve, which you see here in the copy that promotes it. You can make similar offers in thousands of different markets, and as long as you’re reading people a page in their own diary and speaking to them about the most painful things in their life, you’re racking the shotgun. For a much deeper look at crafting sales messages and
writing persuasive copy, listen to my interview with world-class copywriter John Carlton at www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplement. PARETO SUMMARY ▷ The Five Power Disqualifiers® are: 1. Do they have the money? 2. Do they have a bleeding neck—an urgent problem that must be solved now? 3. Do they buy into your unique selling proposition? 4. Do they have the ability to say YES? 5. Does what you sell fit in with their overall plans? ▷ Headline test: If your headline were a classified ad, would it make the phone ring? Don’t focus on your product. Focus on the urgent problem, the bleeding neck. ▷ Best sales formula ever: Problem—Agitate—Solve. Most people don’t spend nearly enough time on the “Agitate” part.
CHAPTER 8 Your USP Unique Selling Proposition Why should I buy from you right now, instead of buying anything else from anybody else next week? What can you uniquely guarantee? That’s your USP. If you have a great answer to that question, you can charge more money, have fatter margins, put more money into marketing and advertising, invest more in customer satisfaction and developing new products. If you have a lousy answer to that question, you’re in trouble before you even start. Symptoms of a bad USP: You’re constantly fighting downward price pressure. You battle directly with other people on price and delivery. You feel competitors breathing down your neck. The cost of advertising seems out of reach. You feel defensive about taking up customers’ time. Nobody really wants to talk to you. You have to knock on lots of doors. If that sounds like you, then there is something you’re not promising, something you’re not guaranteeing or not articulating specifically enough that’s keeping you from being unique and keeping you from making more sales. The pithiest USP I’ve ever seen—this has been running in National Enquirer for about six decades (!): “Corns gone in 5 days or money back.” That simple ad offers a crystal-clear solution to a problem, a specific amount of time, and an “or else” statement. Domino’s Pizza has one of the best-known USPs ever: A
fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed. That’s not unusual now, but in the 1970s, it was a blockbuster. Four Questions Your USP Can and Should Answer 1. Why should I listen to you? WHAT CAN YOU “MAKE” UNIQUE ABOUT YOU? 1. Service. Guaranteed friendliness. Guaranteed delivery. Guaranteed live person on the phone, etc. 2. The market you serve is unique, e.g., your focus is businesses with 10 employees or fewer. 3. Your product is unique. It has a guaranteed result It’s tailor-made for X kind of person. Using it is a guaranteed “experience.” 4. Your whole “experience” is unique. A cab/limo driver promises hot Starbucks coffee and a morning newspaper waiting for you, and he’ll have you to the airport on time or you don’t pay. 5. Your price is unique. It may be a low price (“We’ll beat anyone’s advertised price or your mattress is free!”). It may carry a premium price (see the “Expensive ... by Design” ad in Robert B. Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion). There are guaranteed add-ons that other competitors don’t offer at your price (or which let you ask a higher price). 2. Why should I do business with you instead of anybody and everybody else? 3. What can your product do for me that no other product can do? 4. What can you guarantee me that nobody else can guarantee?
guarantee? You can download a handy three-page USP worksheet and watch a presentation by the president of my company, Bryan Todd, at www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplement/. Business vs. Personal USP; Current vs. Natural USP What’s your natural USP? So far we’ve been talking about the USP of your company, your product, or your service. If you sell 1,000 products, each product should have its own USP. But you also have a personal unique selling proposition that stands distinct from your current product or business. It’s the inherent groove based on your passion, personality, and experiences that you carry with you at all times. Most people are only vaguely aware of their natural, personal USP. I think one of the biggest wormholes that people get sucked into is, they get so enamored with the romantic version of what somebody else does, the greener pastures, that they ignore the unromantic, plain, everyday genius that they themselves possess. The thing I dislike MOST about being a marketing advisor is that it’s so much harder to get people to focus on their own innate giftedness and natural USP. It’s easier to show people a bright shiny object and manipulate them into jumping on the next short-lived bandwagon than to master something that’s just beginning to flourish. That’s frustrating. It does not serve people or propel them to where they really want to go. I play drums. At a training event called “Fantasy Drum Camp,” and also at a music clinic I attended recently, several world-class musicians all made the exact same remark, independently of each other:
“The thing I hate most about being on tour is __________.” How do you think they finished the sentence? Do they hate being away from their families? Sleeping in hotel rooms? Eating at Taco John’s? Battling the music industry mafia? Making some giant screw-up during a live performance? I figured it would be something like “being trapped on a claustrophobic tour bus.” It wasn’t any of those things. Here’s what it was: “The thing I hate most about being on tour is there’s no time or place to practice. I love to practice.” If you want to be a super-successful marketer: Put yourself in a position where you get paid to practice, even if it’s only a modest amount of money. Practice until your “simple” karate punch—ad writing, making sales presentations, buying traffic, negotiating, whatever you love most—is endowed with incredible force. Learn to love repeating even basic things over and over again until you achieve perfection. Don’t fall in love with bright shiny objects. Fall in love with mastery. What should you master? Some aspect of marketing or sales that you naturally love and excel at—harnessing the natural forces of who you are. PARETO SUMMARY ▷ The most important thing in marketing is a unique selling proposition. ▷ Your business USP is an extension of your personal USP.
CHAPTER 9 It’s Not Failure. It’s Testing. OK, so you’ve gotten something to work. You’ve gotten one or two sales. You’ve worked out a good USP. You’ve figured out how to find someone who’s interested, say the right thing, and get a check. What do you do next? 1. Test, then 2. Scale up Whenever you have something in your sales funnel that’s not working, you just need to break it into pieces and make the first piece work. You don’t look at it as failure; you think of it as an experiment that didn’t work. If you can’t sell a product, see if you can give it away. Or give part of it away. If they won’t take the free item, find out why. Testing is hugely important. Testing is scientific. Twenty years ago, hardly anybody thought this way. Today if you don’t think this way, you’re fixin’ to be roadkill. You can test different sales stories, different headlines and offers just about anywhere: in person, on the phone, via email, print ads, or whatever. But if you want to make it clean-cut and as simple as possible, the best place to start is Google AdWords. Why AdWords? It would be natural for you to assume that the reason I say you should do this first is because I’ve created all kinds of books and courses about AdWords. Actually that’s backward. The reason I wrote all those books and courses is because AdWords is the best place to start.
Why? Because AdWords is hands down the most advanced advertising machine in the history of humanity. Nothing else even comes close. Google gets 80 percent of the English language search engine traffic; Google is a source of very steady, reliable clicks. AdWords lets you target any city, state, region, or country— you can target as narrow or wide as you want and in many markets—and it can send you tremendous quantities of traffic. You can set bid prices however you want and daily budgets; you can track everything with precision and measure ROI to the penny. You can stop your campaigns at will by pressing a pause button. I also happen to think it’s the fastest place for a person to learn and master the basics of results-accountable direct marketing. It’s the gold standard. AdWords works like this: If you sell voice mail systems, you open a Google AdWords account. You bid on keywords like: Voice mail Voice mail systems Voice mail software You set a geographic territory (Houston, Texas the whole state of Texas the entire United States / US + UK + Canada + Australia) and a bid price. “I’m willing to bid $1.31 per click.” Figure 9-1. The shaded area at the top and the right side of a Google search are Pay-Per-Click AdWords ads.
Then your ads show up on Google when people search for “voicemail software” (see Figure 9-1). In the screenshot in Figure 9-1, the three entries in the shaded area on the top and the listings running down the right side are all AdWords ads. Google AdWords is an entire world unto itself, and if you’re going to pursue it, I recommend my book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. (If you don’t like my book, buy Howard Jacobson’s or Brad Geddes’ book. But whatever you do, don’t even think about doing AdWords without getting educated first, cuz otherwise Google will vacuum out your wallet real fast.) Also, stop what you’re doing right now, and sign up for my free, online mini-course at www.perrymarshall.com/google. You can pull it up on your smartphone. AdWords is a tester’s dream machine. Let me show you the testing you can do with AdWords, simply by running multiple ads simultaneously. The Unlimited Traffic Technique I learned this from Jonathan Mizel, a reclusive mass consumer marketer who occasionally emerges from his cave in Maui, Hawaii, to teach a seminar or release a training course. He’s a genius. Jonathan says that when you can convert a visitor to a dollar better than everyone else in your niche, you can buy their traffic from them because they’ll make more money selling their visitors to you than they make by keeping the
visitors to themselves. This means that the most important thing you ever do is grow your Value Per Visitor. How do you do that? You split test. How to Combine 80/20 with Split Testing to Multiply Sales 2X, 5X, 20X, and More Split testing is when you test one ad or offer on half your prospects and another ad or offer on the other half. In the old days, split testing was an esoteric, direct-marketing concept that hardly anyone actually did. Now with Google and the internet, it’s easy to do and quite necessary. Here’s a very common example of split testing two Google ads: Popular Ethernet Terms Popular Ethernet Terms 3 Page Guide-Free PDF Download Complex Words-Simple Definitions Complex Words-Simple Definitions 3 Page Guide-Free PDF Download www.bb-elec.com www.bb-elec.com 2 Clicks-CTR 0.1 % 39 Clicks-CTR 3.6% Notice what happened: All I did was reverse two lines—and the Click-Through Rate (CTR) jumped from 0.1 percent to 3.6 percent! (Click-Through Rate is the percentage of people who saw that ad and actually clicked on it.) I’ve conducted entire seminars on all the quirky things you discover when you test Google ads. If you’re buying Google ads and haven’t gotten a thorough hands-on training, you’re probably wasting all kinds of money on AdWords “stupidity tax.” For now, suffice it to say that changing even one word can